Hitched, Even Happy

The author of 'Eat, Pray, Love' decides that marriage isn't so bad, even for her.

By

Meghan Cox Gurdon

Updated Jan. 6, 2010 9:03 a.m. ET

When Elizabeth Gilbert was writing "Eat, Pray, Love" (2006), her quirky account of a year spent variously in Italy, India and Indonesia, she had no idea that it would become a monster best-seller. That's probably a big reason why it went on to become the staple of a thousand book groups: It is full of hilariously unguarded and sometimes wince-making disclosures—particularly about sex—that a writer conscious of the eyes of millions might have omitted. Yet it was the book's very nakedness and exuberant candor that appealed so much to Oprah Winfrey and many other female readers. Its sequel, "Committed," is unlikely to prove as enchanting.

ENLARGE

Committed

By Elizabeth Gilbert (Viking, 285 pages, $26.95)

"Eat, Pray, Love" begins with the author emerging from a horrible divorce, an event that a friend of hers compares to "having a really bad car accident every single day for about two years." It ends, after months of travel, meditation and self-scrutiny, with Ms. Gilbert falling rapturously in love with "Felipe," a Brazilian living in Bali. The world has become Ms. Gilbert's oyster: a place of abundance and spiritual peace, shared with a man who calls her "darling" and wants nothing more than to pour her a glass of wine, prepare a fabulous supper and take her to bed.

But there turns out to be grit in the Gilbert oyster, and it is the subject of "Committed." Felipe and Elizabeth intend to remain happily unmarried. But the American authorities are not flexible. If Ms. Gilbert wants to bring her foreign hottie to live in the U.S., well, she is going to have to marry him.

"Committed" is Ms. Gilbert's attempt to explain how and why she is able to overcome her horror of matrimony, a "repressive tool" of civilization that she regards as "suffocating, old-fashioned, and irrelevant." That the wedding will take place is never in doubt: The book's subtitle is "A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage." The couple tied the knot in 2007.

Nonetheless Ms. Gilbert, at the start of "Committed," is wrestling with her dread of the shackles. To conquer her repulsion, she delves into the history of marriage. She learns that the institution has changed over time: that early Christians favored celibacy over messier domestic arrangements; that a wedding isn't necessarily supposed to be "a delivery device of ultimate bliss." She interviews her mother and friends about married life and learns that both husbands and wives need to make small personal sacrifices if the union is to succeed. This insight would seem stunningly self-evident to anyone who has ever tried to get along with anyone else, but it frightens Ms. Gilbert. Experience has taught her that "every intimacy carries, secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe."

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By far the most entertaining episodes in "Committed" take place in Vietnam, where, as the story unfolds, Elizabeth and Felipe are killing time while he assembles his paperwork for U.S. immigration officials. The delay gives Ms. Gilbert the chance to do a little field work. In one funny scene, she sits down with a group of Hmong women and gamely tries to extract anecdotes about marriage from them. Deploying the sort of question that instantly gets Western women chattering, she asks a wrinkled grandmother where she met her husband. The "very shape of my curiosity seemed a mystery" to the woman, Ms. Gilbert recounts. Whether the woman really knew her husband before their nuptials is a matter of indifference. "As she concluded to the delight of the other women in the room," Ms. Gilbert writes, "she certainly knows him now."

The strain of hanging around waiting for documents begins to show in Ms. Gilbert's own relationship. "Eat, Pray, Love" has yet to become a lucrative hit. The couple is staying in cheap hotels. Such circumstances, not surprisingly, make them scratchy with each other. How scratchy? Fortunately not fatally, but "Committed" is more careful than its predecessor to screen parts of Ms. Gilbert's private life from inquiring eyes. And while that choice may seem wise, it makes the book much less compelling.

Sad to say, "Committed" is also less humane. One of Ms. Gilbert's most endearing qualities in her first memoir was her sunny generosity toward those who see the world differently. In "Committed," she shows less liberality. She finds it "a bit crazy" that social conservatives persist in thinking that marriage means one man and one woman. She is hugely impressed by the pro-marriage arguments of "The Subversive Family," by the British journalist Ferdinand Mount, but is appalled to find that he is conservative. She confesses: "I can honestly say that I never would have ordered this book had I known that fact in advance." And, in an especially unflattering episode, Ms. Gilbert recounts the tense silence that followed her discovery that the small-town mayor summoned to administer her wedding vows is—gasp!—a Republican. This is candor of a less impressive kind. It is bigotry, charm's death-blow.

In the end, Ms. Gilbert realizes that her rebellion against convention has been wrong-headed from the start: "To somehow suggest that society invented marriage, and then forced human beings to bond with each other, is perhaps absurd. It's like suggesting that society invented dentists, and then forced people to grow teeth." She even grasps why we pledge our troth before witnesses. "Marriage is not an act of private prayer," she sees, "it is both a public and private concern, with real-world consequences."

The spectacle of a celebrity author publicly working herself around to a position that she has already taken may seem a trifle sophomoric and more than a little self-indulgent. But here Elizabeth Gilbert is, a re-married woman. It would be churlish not to wish her and "Felipe" every happiness.

Mrs. Gurdon is a regular contributor to the book pages of The Wall Street Journal.

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